John Deverell
The deaths of hundreds of innocent civilians during Israel’s brutal winter 2008-2009 offensive in Hamas-run Gaza sparked outrage across the world. Yet to the surprise of all—including the Israeli security establishment—the West Bank did not explode in violent protest against the war. After 40 years of occupation it seemed as if many West Bankers had finally lost faith in violent resistance.
They may have lost faith in peaceful negotiation too, no longer believing that the international community is serious about getting Israel to lift the yoke, while still wary of anything that could result in yet more retribution at the hands of Israel’s army. The peace process seems deadlocked. President Abbas was keenly aware of this at the Fatah party conference in early August. “Although peace is our choice, we reserve the right to resistance,” he said.
Yet despite the widely felt pessimism, there is grounds for some hope. Part of the reason the West Bank didn’t dissolve into anarchy during the Gaza conflict was the little noticed improvement of its own security forces. Just two years ago, towns like Nablus, Jenin and Hebron had a “wild west” feel to them. But in 2007 Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad ordered a clampdown on gangs and illegal militias. Today, those cities are much safer. Children can go to school unaccompanied, and cars stop at traffic lights.
There is, of course, a strategic objective behind this: improving security helps economic growth in the West Bank, which in turn encourages the all-important moderate Palestinian voice. In the long term, better security should also help the Palestinian Authority to secure its own territory and to ready it for full statehood.
These efforts have been aided since 2005 by a US-led mission, headed by a US general—Keith Dayton—with British and Canadian support. I have spent the past 15 months involved in this bottom-up approach, helping to transform the Arafat-era hotchpotch of security forces. We have provided professional advice, training and non-lethal equipment to many key areas of the security forces, excluding the intelligence services. At my suggestion, we have set up a senior leaders’ course—a sort of high-level Palestinian staff college—helping the Palestinians to establish a core of effective leaders, imbued with the values of human rights, good governance, accountability and the rule of law. Some of the graduates are now in key positions and are keen to reform their own forces.
But the security plan’s success also puts the Palestinian Authority in a difficult position. Without more visible Israeli efforts to make life tolerable, the Authority’s forces are seen as Israeli stooges, keeping their own people oppressed. Meanwhile, Hamas shouts that anything other than armed resistance amounts to collaboration.
The problem is that, despite Tel Aviv’s assurances that “as the Palestinians do more, we will do less,” Israeli security architecture in the West Bank is as strong as ever. Some concessions have been made—a few checkpoints have gone, working conditions for the security forces are a little easier. But these forces generally remain under curfew after midnight and cannot operate in most rural areas without Israeli permission. Cities like Nablus have enjoyed some economic growth in the past few years, but there are still over 600 checkpoints and other obstacles to movement choking the West Bank’s economy—and the security fence, in places twice as high as the Berlin Wall. Israel argues that such measures are essential to protect its citizens against attacks. Yet the awkward truth is that Israeli settlers in the West Bank are well represented in the new coalition of Prime Minister Netanyahu, and they want a continuing, strong Israeli security presence. Their political power is now a logjam in the peace process.
Ironically, then, we can infer that neither side wants to draw too much attention to the West Bank’s law and order improvements: the Israeli government because of the political cost of offering the Palestinians significant concessions, and the Palestinian security forces because they don’t want to be seen as Israel’s helpers. So the situation remains fragile—even explosive—despite valuable efforts at the grassroots level.
What needs to happen now? President Obama has already begun the challenging work of trying to persuade Netanyahu to clamp down on illegal settlements and come to an agreement with the Palestinians on other major issues. But to succeed he needs to expand his audience, speaking not just to the leaders but directly to the people of each side, Palestinians and Israelis. Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority must continue working to improve security and living standards, and do more to persuade its people that its work is for Palestinian, not Israeli, benefit.
Without these efforts and concomitant Israeli concessions, the siren voices of Hamas will get louder, making it more difficult for Abbas and the moderate Palestinians to defend a peaceful route to Palestinian statehood. Conversely, real progress towards a solution can help to undermine Hamas. Israelis and Palestinians at all levels face a choice. Choose wrongly, or do nothing—and sideline the moderates—and it is hard to see how the excellent work done by Palestinians, and outsiders such as Dayton and his team, will be able to continue.
Jo-Ann Mort
By all accounts the Fatah Party Congress earlier this month—the first in 20 years—was a big success. It showed democracy in action, the type that the White House would no doubt like to see throughout the Arab world, with real debate and clean elections. But it was as much about who was not in the meetings room in Bethlehem on 4th-6th August as it was about those in attendance. And those who were not in attendance are as critical to Fatah’s success—and that of the Palestinian nationalist camp that Fatah represents—as those who were.
Among the victors was Marwan Barghouti, a man who was calling the shots as the leader of Young Fatah, from an Israeli prison where he is serving five consecutive life terms for his leadership role in the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades during the second intifada.
Barghouti came third in the central committee voting, but first among the “Young Guard,” Fatah members now in their forties and fifties. This group, who earned their street credibility through two intifadas and myriad terms in Israeli prison, is also seen as more reform and grassroots oriented than the elder Fatah leaders around Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Today, this faction also includes supporters among Palestinian business leaders with MBAs, and intellectuals from the universities.
A shrewd and charismatic leader, Barghouti has already declared his intention to run for the presidency of the Palestinian Authority if elections are held as scheduled in 2010, whether he is in prison or not. His name reportedly is top on the list for a potential prisoner exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who has been held by Hamas since 2006.
“Fatah needs a leader, and according to all the polls and information that we have, Marwan is the leader of the nationalist camp,” Knesset member and leader of the left-wing Meretz Party Haim Oron told me when I visited him recently in his Tel Aviv office. Oron visits Barghouti in prison on a regular basis and has good ties too with Barghouti’s allies in the West Bank, including Qadora Fares, a Young Guard leader seen as Barghouti’s eyes and ears outside of prison. Oron is one of several Knesset members who have called for Barghouti’s release, including former defence minister Ben Eliezer and several members from the Kadima party.
“From [Barghouti’s] point of view, a two-state solution, finishing the conflict with Israel and an existing liberal state has always been his goal. Every Palestinian leader who speaks about a peace agreement knows more or less the parameters of the deal,” Oron explained.
Fares, who talked to me just prior to the Fatah Congress from his office in Ramallah where he heads an NGO for prisoners’ families, puts it this way: “If Marwan is out of prison, in one year we can find a new atmosphere. We need a national leader. Arafat was important because he recognised the other factions. We have movement leaders now. Marwan can bring together all the factions and create a new structure and national identity that includes part of Hamas, the big groups, the intellectuals and the secular.”
A June 2009 poll conducted by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Centre and the Fredrich Ebert Stiftung Centre found that Fatah’s
popularity among Palestinians has risen to 34.9 per cent compared with 26 per cent in January 2009. Hamas’s popularity suffered a setback for the same period: their support ratio declined from 27.7 per cent to 18.8 per cent.
One clear sign of the public’s growing impatience with Hamas is a play written by a known-critic of Hamas that ran for ten days in July in downtown Gaza City and which openly criticised the Hamas strategy of lobbing rockets into Israel. It even featured women in all the key roles, singing in front of a mixed audience that included Hamas minister—in defiance of strict Muslim custom.
There’s no doubt that part of Hamas’s plunge is as attributable to the severe damage that Israel wreaked on Gaza during the recent war as well as the Israeli closure of Gaza to people or goods. Hamas has secured quiet inside Gaza, with no visible evidence of roving gangs or rival extremist movements, but the situation has made the Gaza Strip into a land mass without a functioning economy, at the same time that the West Bank economy is projected to grow by 7 per cent (though the Hamas Culture Minister, Osama Alisawi called the West Bank’s growth “a false improvement,” when I met him at the end of July).
The Hamas leadership is not suffering due to the closure of Gaza—the people of Gaza are. The closure, meant to isolate Hamas, has only strengthened Hamas’s economic hold on the region through their control of the tunnel commerce, along with other tariffs they slap on the small, but determined, business class. This is a stiff and inhumane price to pay for political change.
Indeed, this economic coercion by Hamas is one of the many ironies of the situation, since one of the reasons that Hamas was voted in over Fatah in the first place in 2006 was the perception—and reality—of Fatah’s corruption. And the perception lingers that Hamas leadership is humble. Instead of the beachfront villas of the old guard Fatah leaders that were looted by Hamas after what Fatah calls ‘the bloody coup” of 2007, Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya still lives in his home in the Beach refugee camp, a dismal, dense neighborhood, along with 63,000 other Gazan residents.
“We are telling the people how to work through the siege—that even the Prophet Mohammad went through a siege,” one senior Hamas leader commented, his armed bodyguard waiting outside his office as I sat between his desk and a football match on TV along with two other reporters. He told us, too, that Hamas “ensured salaries and paid them even during the war,” but failed to mention that the money for those salaries came from Prime Minister Fayyad’s Fatah government in Ramallah. He also claimed that Hamas was “regulating businessmen not to hoard” during the siege, but if you talk to businesspeople, the truth is that Hamas demands a tax paid to them outside of whatever taxes lawfully need to be paid to Ramallah.
Still, even with Fatah’s image improved and their polling numbers up, the issue of Palestinian unity looms as large—if not larger—as the need to renew serious peace negotiations with the Israelis. That fact was brought home by the Hamas leadership, which refused to let any of the 470 Fatah delegates from Gaza leave the Strip for the convention. A few managed to sneak out and the rest took part by telephone.
Whatever happens, some form of unity is a prerequisite for elections. As one senior Hamas leader put it to me, “If we agree all together, I am okay for a January 2010 election.”
Jonathan Power
The vista of modern Jerusalem
Each year, over the ages, at Passover time—which begins today—religious Jews have concluded their observance with the prayer, L’shanah haba’ah b’Yerushalayim!—”Next year in Jerusalem!”
Until the 20th century, though, few really believed in the notion of return to Jerusalem any more than most Christians truly believe in the Second Coming. After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD 70, the Jews were thrust into the outer world—many into Arab countries (later to become Muslim countries) where they were largely extended protection and tolerance, as well as into the Roman and then Christian world, where they were accepted for many centuries. There were outbursts of truly virulent anti Semitism, but these came centuries apart.
Over two millennia, many big tribal groups have been dispersed: the Slavs, the Moguls, the Bantu, the Tamils, the Celts. The list is a long one, but only the Jews possess so clear an idea of where they want to go back to.
During the last thousand years, while the Jews were in the diaspora, the Arabs reinforced their settlements on the same land that some Jews yearned for, just as pre-Arab tribes had settled it in the time before Moses. When in 1897 the rabbis of Vienna sent a fact-finding mission to Palestine they reported back that the bride “was beautiful but married to another man.” Likewise, Theodore Herzl, the convenor of the first Zionist Conference in the same year, was not obsessed by a return to Palestine. Almost anywhere would do. Argentina was the first choice with its empty fertile spaces. The Uasin Gishu plateau near Nairobi, Kenya, was another. Read more »
Mary Fitzgerald
lsrael's Arabs: praying for change
As well as claiming the lives of over 1,000 Palestinian civilians, the war in Gaza has exposed deep fissures within Israeli society too. Adam LeBor reports on how the bloodshed has further radicalised IsraeI’s Arabs (currently around 20 per cent of the country’s population). But the last thing they want is to become part of a Palestinian state, he says; instead, many of their leaders are calling for Israel to cease being a Jewish state, and become a “state for all citizens”—with a new name, anthem and flag.
Arab Israelis, however, are just one of many “tribes” causing problems in the increasingly divided and dysfunctional state of Israel, writes John Lloyd. He hears from the country’s leading thinkers about how the threats from within Israel pose a greater threat to its existence than those from outside. Bernard Avishai also picks up on this theme, arguing that Israelis and Palestinians are more at war with themselves than each other. If President Obama is to make any difference in the middle east, Avishai argues, he must understand and exploit the divisions between the hardline and more moderate camps on both sides, and force them to work together. Israel’s leaders, he adds, must be forced into a “panic” that American support is no longer unconditional, but contingent on certain behaviour, like reigning in West Bank settlers.
Meanwhile, Tony Lerman, former director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, heralds the long-awaited birth of J Street—a new, liberal American Jewish lobby. In particular, he notes J Street’s strong criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza as both a bold and a risky move. In electing Obama, though, the American public—Jewish or otherwise—have suggested their growing fatigue with Israel’s wars. And, Lerman notes, it’s about time they had a lobby to support them.
Jonathan Power
The Gaza strip: a failure to find common ground
It’s just what Barack Obama doesn’t need as he prepares to take his oath of office as the 44th president of the USA: another Israeli/Palestinian war inflaming passions anew all over the Arab world—and much of the Muslim world outside too, from Iran to Indonesia. What will his middle name, Hussein, count for in this intense firefight?
Well, maybe something, but only if he moves rapidly to change the long-standing American emphasis on supporting, by both word and deed, the Israeli side at the expense of the Palestinian. It is as simple—and as complicated—as that. After the Bush years, during which the â€clash of civilizations†became the de facto interpretation of American, and to some extent European, policy in the region, the West quickly needs to de-escalate its fixation with what it often sees as the rabid policies of the Muslim world. And it must restore a sense of humility in dealing with a great world-wide civilization, albeit one with its share of bad apples.
Comparison, even in the time of Al Qaeda, does not always work in Christendom’s favour. The West cannot overlook its near-conquest by the Nazis, whose attempt to eliminate the Jews came out of a country that was in many ways the fulcrum of modern Christianity. Nor can we ignore the inroads that atheistic Marxism made in Europe; or indeed an everyday crime rate in western nations that far exceeds that of any Muslim country, especially those in the middle east.
â€It is human to hate†wrote Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington, who died last week, in his too influential book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. “In this new [post-Cold War] world, local politics is the politics of ethnicity; global politics is the politics of civilization. The rivalry of the super powers is replaced by the clash of civilizations.†Read more »
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